Circuit breakers are well known in the art, and are designed to trip in response to an electrical interruption event caused by an overload, short circuit, or thermal runaway condition, thereby opening the circuit to which the circuit breaker is connected and reducing the possibility of damage to the conductor wires or the loads connected to the circuit breaker. A circuit breaker can be reset (either manually or automatically) to resume power flow to the loads.
Some circuit breakers contain a plug-on full jaw, which is made of copper, that is coupled with a jaw spring for mechanically securing a bus bar to the circuit breaker. The full jaw also electrically couples the bus bar to a stationary contact of the circuit breaker. One problem associated with the full jaw is that its inherent design of having two terminal ends considerably increases the material cost.
What is needed, therefore, is a circuit breaker having a plug-on device that reduces material cost.